Thursday, September 29, 2011

So received an email today from eBay about one of my domains violating one of their trade marks. Specifically PayPal. I was pissed at first but then realized its my own fault and they're right I was trying to profit from their domain, though i didn't mean to violate their trade mark.

It has recently come to our attention that you have registered the domain name paypalprofitsiege.info which mimics or contains the PAYPAL trademark. As you must know, PayPal, Inc. (“PayPal”), an eBay company, is the leading provider of online payment services. PayPal has extensively used and promoted the name and trademark PAYPAL since 1999 and registered it as a trademark in numerous jurisdictions around the globe, including the United States. PAYPAL is now one of the most famous brands around the world and enjoys broad trademark rights.

We are concerned that your use of paypalprofitsiege.info infringes and/or dilutes the distinctive PayPal trademark or constitutes cybersquatting, in violation of PayPal’s legal rights. Infringement occurs when someone, without authorization, uses a trademark that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by someone else. Trademark infringement occurs when this unauthorized use confuses consumers to falsely believe that the two parties are related to one-another, or that the true trademark owner is either endorsing or sponsoring the activities of the infringer. Trademark dilution occurs when the unauthorized use is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the true trademark owner’s famous trademark. PayPal diligently protects its famous brand through court proceedings and complaints filed with World Intellectual Property Organization’s arbitration panel. Use of a trademark or domain name that mimics PAYPAL, or which is confusingly similar to it (e.g., a mark that uses a generic term with the distinctive PAL element of PAYPAL for services related to PayPal’s services, such as CASHPAL, MONEYPAL, PAYMENTPAL) violate PayPal’s well-established trademark rights and will not be tolerated by PayPal.

Various countries around the world, including the United States, have enacted laws which protect brand owners against acts of cybersquatting. In the US, the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act provides for serious penalties (up to $100,000 ) against persons who use, sell, or offer for sale a domain name that infringes or dilutes another's trademark. Infringers who have been notified that their use is infringing, but do not cease, may also be considered “willful” and could be subject to additional money damages and liability for attorney’s fees. Having received this email, you are on such notice.

While PayPal respects your right of expression and your desire to conduct business on the World Wide Web, PayPal must enforce its own rights in order to protect its valuable and famous name. We appreciate that you may have registered paypalprofitsiege.info without full knowledge of the law in this area. Nonetheless, under the circumstances, we must insist that you stop using the domain name, not sell, transfer, or offer to sell the domain name to any other person, and simply let the domain name registration expire. You also must not register any other domain names that infringe the PayPal or eBay trademarks.

Just to be clear, PayPal does not desire to interfere with any legitimate business you may be conducting. We are simply asking that you offer those legitimate services under a name, mark and domain name that is not likely to confuse consumers to believe that your company on one hand and PayPal on the other hand are related and/or affiliated.

Please reply to this email and confirm that you will comply as requested. If we do not receive this confirming email, we will have no choice but to escalate this further and take whatever action that may be required to protect PayPal's trademark rights.

Sincerely,

Edith
eBay Legal Department

And here is my response, I'm sure they'll get a kick out of it.

It was not my intention to violate PayPal trademark in anyway. I understand your concern about profiting from a domain which contains a PayPal trademark because of this I have removed my site from the domain and forwarded it to a domain that is not. (paypalsucks.com).

Should you believe the forwarded site is in violation please contact them to resolve the issue.

If eBay/PayPal would like control of the domain paypalprofitsiege.info I am willing to turn the domain over to eBay/PayPal at the cost of $2.15 U.S. plus registrar transfer fees if needed.

If eBay/PayPal would like further action taken please send me written documentation via the U.S. Postal Service. I would assume that you already have my mailing address.

If no further action is taken the domain will expire 9/19/2012 and will not be renewed by me.
Thank you for making me aware of the situation.

Have a good day,
Joe

I have nothing against eBay or PayPal, I actually kind like them for the most part. I really don't care about the domain much I mainly used it for testing things. But if they're going to take the time to go after minor issues like this we might as well have some fun with it.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

I had one hell of a time with Google AdSense. I got banned for a "Risk of Invalid Activity" I found it blocked it and stopped it and my appeal was rejected, it also appears that the "risk" was really small. Of course I expected that. So there goes my 2 bucks a day profit. Whatever I understand that keeping the integrity of their clicks is important but they are really overly aggressive.

Now here I am. around 100 domains parked with Google AdSense and no profit at all. Granted I was getting maybe 10 impressions a day and maybe a click a week... still... I looked for other parking services. GoDaddy, NameDrive and Sedo

GoDaddy is pretty nice and easy to setup if you use GoDaddy to register, but Google won't index them and traffic is hard to get if you follow the rules. I tried with about 10 domains for a month and didn't even make the money back. NameDrive looks good for all the reviews I've seen, decent traffic for the first month or so then a large drop off after. Sounds good but I want something steady so I went with Sedo. Setup was easy, as expected. Just tell them what domains and then change your name servers with your registrar. Also each domain fits in to a category, they auto detect it for ease but for me most where way off. So I had to change about 70 or so manually. First day I am already getting a bit of traffic. I will try to remember to post more about this in a week or so.

Many of the domains I got to promote click bank affiliate products or just because it thought they where funny. I am still trying to figure out the best way to do it but since I am already banned my AdSense my options are more open now though I know one thing, no one likes spam, including me.

I'm looking for a domain database program. I got so many now in use or parked that its hard to keep track and spread sheets just are not cutting it. I'm starting a php/mysql script to keep track, working on it a few minutes a day but would rather find a pre-made one. If anyone has a suggestion let me know, free is preferred but would look at some cheap ones as well.

Monday, September 26, 2011

I saw it was available and just could not resist. Even better GoDaddy had a coupon available and I was able to get it for $1.18. I could not think of a better way to spend a $1.18 at that given moment.

Right now it just a picture of the angry baby and a few lines of text. Though every time I type it I think of Jim Jefferies. If you don't know who he is go check him out, he is pretty funny.

I have no real plans for the domain other than letting it sit there and giggle about it once in a while.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

EHostIt.Net was made back when myspace was still the thing to do a few years ago. It was a place where people could upload images and it generated code for people to use the images in their profiles and comments. It still does this but I don't know if it works still or not. It also had a Style sheet generator that would change your my space profile colors and such. It worked great and got lots of traffic back then.

Now days it is rarely used and it is mainly only still here because I like the domain name. You can still upload images to it and use them for other purposes though but no one really does.

It has an Alexa Ranking of around 24million and some back links, it used to be PR 5 a few years ago now it is 0, I am not surprised but it is a bummer.
EHostIt.Biz, This is my domain flipping e-book. It goes over the basics of buying and selling domain names. Where to buy, how to buy, what to buy and where to sell. Gives a really good intro to the business. most places have this for $17 or more, I sell it for $9.99. with your first flip you should get more than your money back.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

I like to try to keep up on the goings of on in the political arena so it has some interest to me. Oh there was a sale on .us domain names so I was able to pick it up for cheap so I went with it.

This site is just a simple word press auto-blogger grabbing snippets from RSS feeds and creating direct links to the full story. I thought briefly about doing rewrites on them but the cost of a mistake could be high.

News Feeds currently include Fox News, MSNBC and Yahoo. I figured I'd get both sides of idiots in there and the yahoos as well :-) If you know of another good election site I can load in give a yell i'll take a look at it.

It is monetized by AdBrite, they don't seem to have a high pay out but do pay you for unique impressions. They are also much easier to deal with than AdSense, so far at least.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Cash One Solutions, I orginally got this domain because I had planned to resell it to one of them payday loan services. They offered me five grand for it. While we where working out a deal laws changed and their plans got put on hold years later I still have it.

Rather than let this premium name expire I decided recently to put something on it. I threw some work from home info up, a couple ads and some click bank products that are useful and fairly related. I also did an AdWords campaign that was really successful.

In the first two weeks I made $50 AdSense alone. I slowed my advertising down after that but still pull in about 10-15 this week from a site that went live just 23 days ago. It is a far cry from the $5,000ish I was going to sell for but it is a great start.

These sites have around 7,500 and 3300 pages indexed in Google. The pages are not monetized at all as I was having some problems with AdSense and never got around to putting it back on. Though I am thinking about going with AdBrite for PPC ads and Amazon on startrekvids.com. I really don't care though, they're more for fun. If I get around to it, i do if not.. oh well.
Star Trek VidsSilly Pussys

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

This is my largest website, over 200,000 pages over 8,000 indexed by Google.

The wonderful thing about this site is that it is a set and forget site, almost. Every so often, every day or two I run a script to update the videos. After that I just have to load the main page to verify no odd content got added.

It comes up on the second page of Google results for the keyword "Naboo" and has been climbing the past 6 months.

The Alexa rank has been slowly going up as well. At this time its around 12 million.

It has no real back links other than a few of my other pages and received over 1,400 Visits in the past month according to Google Analytics.

I have thought about selling the domain and site many times, though what people are willing to pay do not off set my personal like of the site.

Well I decided the web and programming projects are too small and far in between. And don't get me started on doing freelance system administration. People hire you to do something they don't know anything about say something isn't right because they don't know anything about it. Listen folks you are not paying me to teach you how to do it.. just to do it.

anyway, right now my big projects are domain speculating web affiliate projects. With PPC (AdSense and AdBrite) ads mixed in. My plan is to find okay domains, develop them at least a little even if it is just a landing page and then resell them after a few months and repeat.

I started out small with 20ish domains some that I have already had and now I am at over 100. by the end of the year I would like to have over 1000 but I doubt that will happen.

Every day I'm going to try to post a quick note about a domain or three I'm working on here in separate posts. Some of the ones I've set up are semi useful, but the vast majority of the ones I currently have are parked.

TIP:
One big lesson I learned is that NEW parked domains are worthless. Do not ever park a brand new domain anywhere if you plan on making money on it.

I also plan on updating my progress with this blog giving people an idea on how I'm doing it and if I've found it worth it.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

While I loved working with my own custom CMS that I called INSite, it is really dated and I just don't have the patience to update it. Blogger is more than enough for what I want to do with my own personal site.

Monday, September 19, 2011

While I love the one I wrote, this is just easier and I don't have to maintain the code. It'll just be much easier that way I think. I may actually update more often than once a year as well! Not like any of you really care it is mainly for me anyway. Final decision later in the day I think. Right now I have to poop!